Category Archives: WMD

I have mixed thoughts on the US cruise missile strike on the Syrian airfield last night.

These thoughts are going to appear all over the map but given the situation in the Middle East, that seems unavoidable:

• There can be no doubt that Syria’s armed forces launched the sarin attack that prompted the US cruise missile strike. The excuse that the Syrians and Russians gave that Al Nusra moved a sarin lab into the area and an air strike inadvertently released the chemicals is absurd. Sarin would burn off in such a strike and would not be dispersed in such a way as to cause mass casualties. Syrian forces have used fixed wing aircraft to launch chemical attacks in the past. It appears that the US military has intelligence, either through technical or human means–or both–about how the chemical attack was conducted.

• I hope that the cruise missile strike is strictly a punitive strike against Assad for his use of chemical weapons and not a signal that the US is getting more involved in the Syrian melee or choosing sides in a multi-sided war that has no good guys (in any significant numbers) on any side.

• America’s main interest in Syria continues to be the destruction of the Islamic State.

• The Jihadists who are arrayed against Assad are organizations that he for years supported and allowed to stage through Syria via rat lines into Iraq’s Al Anbar province. This is a case of Frankenstein’s monsters turning against Dr. Frankenstein.

• The pundits who are claiming that Assad is “secular” or a “protector of Christians” and therefore should not be targeted are ignorant. Assad has been a long-time sponsor of Jihadist terrorism. The groups that he is now fighting against were once under his protection. He is a long-time sponsor of Jihadist terrorism, particularly Hezbollah. Syria has protected and provided safe haven to Hezbollah for decades. Until September 11th, 2001, Hezbollah had racked up the highest body count of Americans of any terrorist organization in the world, including the 23 October 1983 Islamikaze bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. In other words, Assad is an enemy of the US and always has been. The fact that he dresses like a Westerner and is not a pious Muslim himself is completely irrelevant. Moreover, Assad has waged a propaganda campaign to convince gullible Westerners that he is a protector of Christians. It serves his purposes at this point to portray himself that way, but, remember, the organizations committing genocide against Christians in Syria today once enjoyed Assad’s protection.

• Obama was in a much better position to take action against Assad’s chemical arsenal years ago and failed to do so after speaking loudly about it. President Trump inherited a position of weakness and sought to re-establish American strength in the theater of operations.

• The Russians claimed that they had removed all of Syria’s chemical weapons back in 2014 in a deal trumpeted by the Obamanistas. They lied. The Russians lie. That is what they do.

• The key ally to the Russians and Syrians in the conflict is Iran, a mortal enemy of the US. That’s worth mentioning.

A German journalist named Jurgen Todenhofer managed to get himself embedded with the Islamic State for ten days without getting taken hostage and beheaded. How he managed that we have no idea, but he has written a book about what he learned during those ten days.

His book is called “Inside IS – Ten Days in the Islamic State,” and it reportedly reveals much about the Islamic State’s intentions, which come as no surprise to many of us, though the Obama administration has been oblivious and disinterested in the threat IS poses.

Todenhofer maintains that the West has underestimated the power of the Islamic State and is unprepared for what it seeks to do.

This rings true for us.

The Islamic State is a greater threat than Al Qaeda is and perhaps ever was. This is evidenced by the fact that, unlike Al Qaeda, the Islamic State has been able to inspire Muslims in the West to both carry out individual acts of violent Jihad and to travel to the Middle East by the hundreds–even by the thousands–to join its ranks.

Todenhofer claims that the Islamic State aims to get hold of nuclear weapons to kill millions of its enemies.

While we take this threat seriously, we believe there are other aspects of the IS threat involving WMD that pose a more immediate threat.

While we have no doubt that IS desires to kill millions with nuclear weapons, the only way we can see them fulfilling that dream in the near-term, is if someone in Pakistan gives IS a nuke, which we don’t regard as very likely in the near-term. The folks in charge of the nukes in Pakistan are the few who are still fairly responsible and Westernized from what we understand. We should expect that to change in the future, but not necessarily the near future.

Nevertheless, there have been persistent reports of IS using mustard gas in Syria, so they are more than willing to use WMD and have some capability in that regard. Mustard isn’t really that adaptable to terrorism as much as combat, but what we really fear is that IS would piece together a radiological “dirty bomb” and detonate it in a US or European city with lingering, devastating consequences. We think that is the number one threat from the Jihadists involving nukes/WMD.

Radiological material isn’t particularly difficult to obtain; a quantity was reportedly present in Mosul, a city in northern Iraq that IS seized well over a year ago.

President Obama has selected one of the worst possible candidates imaginable to become Secretary of Defense. Chuck Hagel has a history of being weak on Jihad and terrorism, the greatest threat to American lives and national security today.

Hagel’s nomination should become a “teaching moment.” Just because someone served honorably in the uniform of the United States military or has an “R” instead of a “D” after his name, does not automatically mean that the person is strong on national security policy.

Chuck Hagel is as bad on the threat of Jihadist terrorism as anyone in America. Not only has he been on the wrong side of votes on the issue, but his votes demonstrate a lack of commitment on the issue, as well a tendency to enable Jihad:

• Wrong on Iraq

A graphic depiction of the impact of the surge on Al Qaeda in Iraq

Initially, then-Senator Hagel voted in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom to overthrow Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. But when the insurgency did not go so well, Hagel flip-flopped and called for a withdrawal of US troops in just 120 days back in 2007.

Had such a policy been implemented, Al Qaeda and other Jihadist elements would have emerged victorious in Iraq and the US would have been seen as clearly losing Iraq to Al Qaeda. This would have energized Al Qaeda and given it the biggest recruiting boost since the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States homeland. This would have essentially allowed the global jihad to morph at an accelerated rate.

Then, when the US announced the surge counteroffensive in Iraq, Senator Hagel said it would be “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it’s carried out.”

Hagel is clearly no military strategist. The surge broke the back of the insurgency, drastically reduced the violence in Iraq and allowed the US to draw down its force levels in a secure manner.

To be sure, Iraq is no utopia today, but violence levels there are no where near what they were during the insurgency and, most importantly, Al Qaeda was denied victory in Iraq due to the surge.

Wrong on Hezbollah

In 2006 Hagel was one of a just 11 senators who refused to sign a letter urging the European Union to designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Hezbollah not only killed 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors in Beirut, Lebanon on 23 October 1983, they also kidnapped and murdered US Marine Colonel William Higgins in 1988 when he was on UN Peacekeeping duty. More recently, Hezbollah was active in fighting US GIs in Iraq and Hezbollah members captured, tortured and killed US GIs in Iraq.

Colonel William “Rich” Higgins, USMC–Kidnapped and murdered by Hezbollah in 1988.

Ali Mussa Daqduq: Hezbollah leader captured in Iraq in 2007. He planned a raid in which 4 US soldiers were captured, subsequently tortured and killed in Karbala, Iraq. He was captured by US Special Operations Forces, but was released from custody when President Obama refused to have him remanded to the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Wrong on Iran

Iranian “art” in Tehran

Chuck Hagel has a shamefully weak record on Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of Jihadist terrorism and a serial proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.

His weakness on Iran goes way back to August of 2001 when he was one of just two US Senators to vote against renewal of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act was set up to punish entities for investing in Iranian or Libyan petroleum industries, aiming to prevent Tehran or Tripoli from gaining petroleum profits that could be used to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction or to finance terrorism.

In September 2007, Hagel voted against designating the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity. 76 Senators voted for the bill in an overwhelming bipartisan vote.

In July 2008, Hagel voted in the Senate Banking Committee against legislation imposing sanctions on countries conducting certain business with Iran. The legislation passed 19-2.

In October 2008 Hagel single-handedly killed Senator Gordon Smith’s (R-Oregon) S.970 Iran Counter-Proliferation Act, a bill that had 71 co-sponsors, 36 Republican and 35 Democrat. This act would have strengthened the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (now referred to simply as the Iran Sanctions Act).

Chuck Hagel: Wrong for America

Leftist pundits are creating a straw man argument by promoting the meme that only the “Jewish lobby” is opposed to Hagel because of his record of not supporting Israel.

This dishonest tactic is merely meant as a smokescreen to mask Hagel’s shamefully weak, longstanding record on Jihad and terrorism primarily directed against the United States and its citizens.

Call and write your Senator and tell him/her to oppose the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. America cannot afford to have someone as weak on Jihadist terrorism as Chuck Hagel.

There are two significant worries for the West with regard to the future of Libya in the wake of its revolution.

1. What form will the new regime take? Will it be dominated by Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood?

We already have indications that the new Libyan constitution will be based on Sharia, which is a bad first step from a Western perspective, since Sharia commands of its adherents that they either wage or support violent Jihad to make allah’s religion supreme on earth. A regime dominated by Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood will be inherently hostile toward the West, despite what the Left in the West may wish to believe. Need we remind anyone of the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto?

– Allah is our objective.– The Prophet is our leader.– Qur’an is our law.– Jihad is our way.– Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

Perhaps the most ominous sign in Libya is the fact that the apparent leader of the revolution’s armed wing is a violent Jihadist with ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. We alluded to this a few days ago…

2. Just as worrisome as the Islamist and Jihadist tendencies of the new regime are the disposition of the numerous weapons spread all around Libya–everything from small arms and Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) to advanced, Russian-made MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense Systems), also known as shoulder-fired surface to air missiles.

Up to this point, it has generally been assumed that Jihadist terrorists have been armed with the SA-7 Grail MANPAD. While the SA-7 can be deadly, it is considered a first generation MANPAD that can be effectively neutralized with various countermeasures. We don’t see or hear of many instances these days in which the SA-7 has downed any aircraft.

SA-7 Grail

Unfortunately, it appears that the Libyans had plentiful stocks of the much more advanced SA-24 Grinch. The SA-24 in the hands of Jihadist terrorists and insurgents would pose a much greater threat to both civilian airliners and military helicopters. Given the make-up of the new regime in Libya, not to mention the chaos there over the past several months, there is a very real possibility, if not a probability, that Libyan SA-24s will end up in the hands of organizations such as Al Qaeda, Hamas and the Taliban.

SA-24s in the hands of Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban and others represents a exponential increase in the lethality and capability of those groups to inflict casualties on American, NATO, Israeli and other allied militaries, not to mention the ominous scenario in which the SA-24 could be used to attack civilian airliners.

Unfortunately, many on the Left in the West seem to be completely in denial about the National Transition Council (NTC), assuming that the NTC will safeguard all of these weapons and not allow them to fall in the hands of Jihadists. But with so many Jihadists making up the NTC, including its leadership, that wishful thinking is likely to get some innocent people killed.

Nor are MANPADS the only weapons that we need to worry about. Among the weapons stockpiled in and around Libya are various types of anti-tank weapons. We’re not talking about run-of-the-mill RPGs here, we’re talking about ATGWs (Anti-Tank Guided Weapons). Among the weapons thought to be in the Libyan inventory prior to the revolution were AT-3 Saggers, AT-4 Spigots and AT-5 Spandrels. These weapons are light years ahead of the RPG in terms of armor penetration, accuracy and range.

The AT-3 is a 1970s-era, wire-guided weapon. While this missile is unlikely to be able to penetrate the frontal armor on the M-1A2 Abrams main battle tank, it is a major threat to armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles and, whereas the RPG has a maximum range of around 300 meters, the AT-3 has an effective range of between 1000 and 3000 meters. Libyan “rebels” have in fact been observed using AT-3s in the past few months.

AT-3 Sagger

The AT-4 Spigot was originally designed as the replacement for the AT-3 in Soviet service and it has several improvements over the AT-3 including a closer-range engagement capability of just 70 meters, higher flight speed and improved accuracy and armor penetration. It’s maximum effective range is 2,000 meters.

AT-4 Spigot

The AT-5 Spandrel is roughly equivalent to the US TOW ATGW and mainly launched from armored vehicles, although it can also be deployed as a man-portable system. It has a greater armor penetrating capability than the AT-3 and AT-4 and has a range of between 70 and 4,000 meters. Iranian-manufactured copies of the AT-5 were reportedly used with good effect by Hezbollah against Israeli forces in 2006.

AT-5 Spandrel

Finally, none of this addresses the even more worrisome issue of stocks of radiological material and chemical agents in Libya.

There are thought to be Libyan stocks of material suitable for making “dirty” bombs, something that has been a nightmare scenario on the minds of Western security organizations for years. These stocks include uranium yellowcake.

Libya’s chemical agents are believed to mostly be made up of mustard gas. It’s Sarin nerve agents were reportedly never fully completed. The condition of the mustard agents is unknown and mustard gas is in fact bulky and perishable, so we can all “hope” that no Libyan mustard gas falls into sinister, hostile hands. But, as we all know, “hope” is not a policy.

Unfortunately, more and more evidence indicates that at least some of the Libyan rebels, including some real important ones, are Jihadists. Some have ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Take Abdul Hakeem Belhaj. He’s one of the rebel leaders and he got to where he is today by first joining the LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group). He fought in Afghanistan and left in a hurry when US forces toppled the Taliban regime. He ended up in Malaysia, where he was arrested and eventually shipped back to Libya where he was put in prison. He was either freed or escaped during the course of the uprising and now he is a rebel leader.

This doesn’t give us a good feeling at all, especially given the fact that Libya has stocks of uranium yellowcake and chemical agents.

Al Qaeda’s leaders yearn to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction against the United States; if they acquired a nuclear bomb, they would not hesitate to use it.

The evidence for those intentions aren’t hidden in encoded communications or classified intelligence. Quite the opposite: They’re hidden in plain sight. Just as Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa to declare war on the United States in 1998, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a fatwa a decade later to herald a prospective next stage in the conflict. If we take him at his word, some day jihadists will use weapons of mass destruction to change history once and for all.

Of course, al Qaeda leaders have spoken of acquiring weapons of mass destruction for well over a decade. They have had little observable success in achieving their goals of producing a nuclear bomb or biological weapon capable of producing mass casualties. Fortunately, it is extremely difficult, but not impossible, for a terrorist group to acquire a strategic weapon of mass destruction (WMD). Nonetheless, the al Qaeda core has kept at it over the years, in the hopes that time and opportunity will enable it to overcome the daunting challenges in this regard.

What has changed recently is that the goal is no longer theoretical, but operational — a change spurred by Zawahiri’s intervention. Rather than follow bin Laden in issuing a religious edict, Zawahiri chose to release a book in 2008 titled Exoneration. In it, he resurrects a fatwa issued by senior Saudi cleric Nasir al-Fahd in May 2003 — notoriously, the only such treatise that ever endorsed the use of WMD. Zawahiri adopts Fahd’s ideas wholesale. He uses the same ideas, thoughts, examples, and scholarly citations to reach the same conclusion: The use of nuclear weapons would be justified as an act of equal retaliation, “repaying like for like.”

Zawahiri raises key Quranic themes to sweep away all potential objections to the use of WMD. He offers answers to questions about the legality of killing women, children, and the elderly; the justice of environmental destruction; the morality of harming noncombatants; the tactical prudence of attacking at night; and analyses of deterrence. Zawahiri adopts Fahd’s examples verbatim: The Prophet Mohammed’s attack on the village of al-Taif using a catapult, for instance, permits the use of weapons of “general destruction” incapable of distinguishing between innocent civilians and combatants.

The U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency will likely consider a special inspection of Syria to answer nagging questions over its nuclear activities, the U.S. ambassador to the organization said Tuesday.

Glyn Davies said a number of countries on the IAEA’s board of governors support plans to invoke the rarely used sanction.

Like Iran, Syria is suspected of hiding weapons-related nuclear activities and has blocked access to a suspected nuclear site destroyed by Israeli warplanes in September 2007.

“We need to keep the focus very much on Iran — but stay tuned on Syria, because Syria I think would love to just stave off any serious action to get to the bottom of what they were doing,” Davies told reporters in London.

A recent IAEA report said that uranium particles found at the Dair Alzour desert facility indicate possible covert nuclear activities. The finding supported Western allegations that the bombed target was a nearly completed nuclear reactor which the U.S. alleges was of North Korean design and intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Linked below is an excellent article by Jim Kouri of the National Association of the Chiefs of Police about America’s continued vulnerability due to our lack of border security.

In fact, that vulnerability includes a very real threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). WMD can take many forms unfortunately, including a nuclear bomb, chemical munitions, or biological agents.

Another type of WMD that has received a certain amount of publicity in recent years is the so-called “dirty bomb.” Technically referred to as a “radiological” weapon, a dirty bomb presents more detection challenges than a conventional nuclear bomb because the dirty bomb can be much more compact.

Fortunately, a dirty bomb is far less destructive than a nuclear bomb.

However, a dirty bomb could rather easily be concealed in the back of a minivan or pick-up truck and driven across our northern or southern border.

It turns out that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a test of our border security and pretty much found that it wouldn’t be much of a problem to transport just about any form of WMD into the USA from Mexico or Canada…

Peter Huessy, who has assisted with the Divest Terror Initiative in both California and Maryland, has an excellent article appearing today on the Family Security Matters web site.

Huessy has been associated with the National Defense University and has a great deal of expertise on national security matters and he focuses on the threat of nuclear terrorism in his column today.

For our purposes, the article brings up the issue of state sponsorship of terrorism and the way the State Department treats that label.

First of all, despite what you might read and hear elsewhere, state sponsorship is still absolutely vital for Jihadist groups in particular. The idea of totally independent, non-state terrorists is largely a myth.

Even Al Qaeda and its affiliates require state sponsorship and have benefited from it for years. In the 1990s, Sudan hosted them and facilitated their relations with Hezbollah and HAMAS. The Sauds have either paid Al Qaeda protection money, or looked the other way as members of the royal family have funded them. The Sauds have also funded HAMAS, in particular the surviving families of Islamikaze bombers. Iran’s support for Al Qaeda has received less publicity, but it is true nonetheless. Iran’s longstanding and massive support for Hezbollah is well known. And of course the old Taliban regime in Afghanistan gave safe haven to Al Qaeda, as have the Pakistanis as well. These are but a few examples of state support for Jihadist terrorists.

Jihadists need places to train and rest and they need funding. Nation states provide these things, either overtly, or simply by looking the other way as terrorists set up shop in their territory.

For decades, the US State Department has kept a list of terrorist-sponsoring nations. Currently, three nations on that list support Jihadist terrorist groups: Iran, Syria and Sudan. Cuba is the fourth nation on the list, though they do not appear to have any ties to Jihad. In fact, there are no active ties between Cuba and any known terrorist group at the moment.

This State Department list has always been inadequate. For instance, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan never made the list, yet without them, where would Osama Bin Laden have hidden?

And nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan aren’t on the list, but both are most assuredly state sponsors of Jihadist terrorism. But since they are what we call “allies,” they will never be on the list.

(Incidentally, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was on the list for many years, yet the Left seems to have selective amnesia when ever that point is brought up.)

Even for the countries who do get listed, the convoluted and acrobatic State Department language experts (in this case the foreign language is English) manage to write their descriptions in such a way that the reader doesn’t know whether the country is a terror sponsor or an ally against terrorism. This is especially true of Sudan. State lists Sudan as a terror sponsor and then typically devotes the whole section on Sudan to what a wonderful job the genocidal regime is doing to fight terrorism. Huessy writes about this in his excellent article, which should be considered a must read…

One of the most underreported stories of the past few months has been the confirmation that evidence indicates that the Syrian nuclear facility which Israel bombed a couple of years back was indeed a facility that was being built in violation of international treaties to which which Syria was a party.

Reports at the time of the lightning Israeli air strike at the time indicated that there were significant numbers of North Korean casualties at the Syrian facility.

To any rational observer, these two tidbits amount to smoking gun evidence that Syria had embarked upon a nuclear weapons program, that only Israeli vigilance disrupted.

So what has the Obama administration decided to do? Reward Syria by sending a series of VIPs to meet with them, including Senator John Kerry, who has had the hots for Syria since he ran for president way back in 2004.

This is the same Syria which facilitated rat lines along which 90% of the Islamikaze bombers who carried out attacks in Iraq transited. An earlier post on Terror Trends Bulletin discussed a US operation to disrupt that activity: